Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers
smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About
us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee
steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est Irlandais.
Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux Irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez? Ah oui!
She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know
that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona,
queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well : slainte! Around
the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His
breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang thrusting
between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur
Griffith now. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause.
You’re your father’s son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered,
trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist,
Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow
teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, La
Patrie, M. Millevoye, Félix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The
froeken, bonne à tout faire, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala.
Moi faire, she said. Tous les messieurs not this Monsieur, I said. Most licentious
custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my brother, not even my
own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel.
Lascivious people.
The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobacco
shreds catch fire : a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones
under his peep of day boy’s hat. How the head centre got away, authentic
version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil orangeblossoms, drove out the
road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes.
Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.
Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you,
I’ll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love he prowled
with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell
and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog. Shatte-
red glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought
by any save by me. Making his day’s stations, the dingy printingcase, his three
taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d’Or,
damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She
is quite nicey comfy without her outcastman, madame, in rue Gît-le-Coeur,